My Fair Ladies

[Jerome Park]

I doubt that conflating the Greek with the Roman, then mixing in the
Judeo-Christian, and constructing a pyramid with an underclass of
slaves and females that may be contracted with the Eastern levelers
will prove a valid approach. First, we can't even treat the Greeks,
that is, the ancient Greeks generally, that includes Aristotle and
Plato and the rest, as one mind on the ladies fair and foul. But even
if we could, and we can't and mustn't, we would be in greater error
were we to fail to notice how, Aristotle's "scientific" view is
directly opposed to the Roman's view, again, generally, to include
Cicero and his compatriots. The watershed of Christian thought on
God's creation can't be reconciled with the Judeo view, so here we
have another major shift in a new, and if not equally, opposite
direction. While Pynchon may be all mystical, so too is the Christian,
who finds in binaries, dialects sublime that beyond a mere mortal's
ken. We can but praise Nature's carnival:

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).  Poems.  1918.

13. Pied Beauty


GLORY be to God for dappled things—	
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;	
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;	
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;	
  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	        5
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.	

All things counter, original, spare, strange;	
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)	
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;	
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	        10
                  Praise him.
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